So whether it be cigarettes, swearing, bad behaviour, bad eating habits or anything else that you need to change because you consider it an addiction or bad habit.

What is the best cure for Addiction?

Is Laziness close to Godliness?

Why not try being lazy?

It takes an enormous amount of effort to keep bad habits. For example:

Most people hate getting up in the morning BUT a cigarette smoker will happily;

Wake up early

Get dressed

Drive to the closest store

Purchase cigarettes

All for their addiction.

But I seriously doubt that anyone would do the same thing to get something positive like

Healthy food or catch a lecture or buy a bouquet of flowers for a loved one.

So being Lazy can help kick-start your end to addiction but you will also need to know how to take action and do something positive.

The point is that you need control of yourself so that you can become either lazy or active when the situation calls for it; and most of us are active in bad habits and lazy with our good habits. We just need to switch it up.

What is Addiction really?

Smokers are not addicted to how wonderful cigarettes make them feel because cigarettes make you feel crap.

They are addicted to;

The sensation of Deep breathing which is associated with smoking and which is calming especially without the cigarettes.

The Type of social interaction that it brings, with a cigarette in your hand you can interchange conversing with someone and indulging at the same time and it’s acceptable. If you don’t wish to talk or even when you are just listening you can puff away and feel good that you have human interaction.

The Fear of missing out on having a cigarette. We catalogue and list activities in our brains, When we are not smoking and even when we are smoking we are subconsciously thinking about our next cigarette because we have programmed smoking to be a task that we must complete. In our minds we feel obliged to have that cigarette because it’s the norm in our routine.

As you can clearly see Addiction is more a mental than physical thing, therefore you need more mind power than physical power to control it.

Using Meditation to rid yourself of addiction

We consider two things when creating good or bad habits;

1. Ease/Comfort

2. Enjoyment/Satisfaction.

So in order to Delete/Control this habit from your system you must convince yourself that;

1. It is hard to do and uncomfortable.

2. You don’t enjoy it or get any satisfaction both while you are doing it and after you have done it.

How to do it?

An example would be to get yourself into a slow and deep breathing cycle, then be in a positive happy frame of mind.

(The reason you set yourself up in a deep breathing and positive frame of mind from the beginning is so that your mind and body associate all that you now do with these good sensations.)

Remember a time that cigarettes made you feel sick

or

imagine you have just smoked three cigarettes in a row and get the sensation that you no longer need one for now.

The point is to own your feelings and convince yourself that you do not need cigarettes.

But how about attacking the physical sensors. The mind is a powerful thing and you can use it convince your body it is sick or healthy.

Meditation and Taste

You can also deceive your mind into sensing taste. Self-control is about total control of your sensors so if you are up for the challenge try this out.

The Meditation

Prepare yourself for meditation as I went through in my previous post, low noise, comfortable position, deep slow breaths , release the bad energy and fill yourself with the good, be at a happy state of mind.

Psychology of taste

Taste is about smell and texture so when meditating imagine yourself holding a lemon in your hand.

1. roll it around in your fingers feeling the bumps and hardness of it’s skin.

2. bring it towards your nose and smell the scent of lemon.

3. bring it back out and roll it in your fingers one more time.

4. Finally take a slow bite of that lemon and you will taste the sourness on your tongue.

How did you go?

Depending on how slow and focused you were you should have tasted that lemon.

Give me some feedback and tell me how you went.

Next post I will show you how far physical senses can go whilst meditating.

I have a friend that meditates regularly and sends me audio tapes and books about how to meditate involving Chakras and astral projection and other stuff that I find hard to get my head around.

I never mediated except for Dhikr which as a muslim is an act of stopping and remembering God before doing something. But it is also an escape from the world; a small prayer.

While remembering God I’d feel all else fade away except myself and God, but I don’t see God just feel that He sees me. (Just like normal prayer).

Meditation; as my friend told me was to empty your mind and find peace within yourself.

Now I felt I already had peace as during prayer we are to ignore all other distractions, we cannot even break wind because we would become dirty and have to perform ablutions again.

Islamic Meditation?

Now I don’t want to turn my teachings of meditation into Islamic Meditation so all I’m talking about here is how I got to my techniques where I came from.

In Islam we don’t need meditation because our prayer is intense personal and our Dhikr (remembrance) is intense and personal.

My reason for getting into meditation was to relax while not in prayer and to try some ideas that I had; to play with my mind-body connection.

The Meditation Empty and fill

I just sat with my legs crossed and back straight and closed my eyes making sure that the phones were off and I wouldn’t be distracted for a while. One thing I noticed about the meditation position is that you should be at a point of relaxation and a little pain so that you do not fall asleep. So sit up straight and be a little stretched.

I continuously breath deeply and slowly in through my mouth and out through my mouth. (It’s just how I do it, you can breath through your nose if you wish.)

After I got nice and calm;

The first meditation

I close my eyes and picture myself sitting in a grass field that extends in each direction indefinitely.

I feel only I exist as well as God or a light from above.

I breathed all of the air slowly into my lungs imagining all of my negativity running up my legs and arms towards my chest and collecting inside me. then I’d exhale it all back out slowly down my arms and legs and out through my toes and fingertips.

I continue this until I feel empty of all negativity.

The first growing

First I gear my mind towards happiness and smile while I inhale all of the positive power in the universe. I feel it running up and fingers and toes along my legs and arms and filling my body.

This was the first meditation I did and still do. I have many more advanced ones to share but I’ll leave those for other posts as it is just too much information to take in all at once.